The present invention relates to a sheet feed and positioning mechanism which may be advantageously utilized for feeding and positioning an original document for electrostatic reproduction on a platen of a copying machine.
In the present state of the art of electrostatic copying, an original document for copying is placed face down on a glass platen for imaging. This operation is generally performed by hand. Copying of a large number of identical documents is necessarily slow due to the length of time required for this manual operation.
Automatic mechanisms for feeding original documents onto platens are known, which utilize the center of the document as a reference and generally comprise timers or complicated mechanical arrangements for terminating the feeding at the proper point. All of such known mechanisms are, however, inaccurate, complicated and expensive to manufacture.